The publicly funded research in the Scientific Technical Medical (STM) literature contains multibillion dollars of unused value. Most scientific articles contain names, numbers, places, chemicals, organisms, graphs, tables, etc. which can be extracted and re-used. This leads to better science, new information products, startup companies, better information for policy makers and much more which I have estimated at "low billions" for chemistry alone. For STM, especially medicine, the figure is much higher. Yet this is currently unavailable for the reasons: (a) publishing uses PDF which is a very poor way of conveying the information (b) publishers active prevent mining of the content to preserve their revenues.

We must change this, and soon, though (a) evangelism of the opportunity (b) lobbying for our rights (c) building the next generation of tools. I shall cover all these, including our Manifesto on Open Content Mining and demonstrations of AMI2 - a weakly intelligent amanuensis for the scientist (based initially on understanding PDFs). This offers great opportunities for citizenry in general to liberate this vast resource of valuable information.

Start of a short (10-day) consultation on what's needed for round 3 of the project. Will end up with list of 10 Most Wanted synthetic compounds and 10 Most Wanted commercial/lit compounds. We'll only be making a few in Sydney, and putting the others out to tender.﻿

New human-readable project summary page is up - this page will be updated continuously as new things come in. The arylpyrroles are spectacular compounds, clearing the hERG assay and having astonishing potency against stages of the malaria parasite that are difficult to kill, and low metabolic clearance rates (but low solubility) ... but we've just learned that they showed no oral efficacy in mice. That's a pain. Raw data not up yet - should be in a day or two. We'll need to assess all data together to see whether the series is worth continuing with, hence the need to view all the data together, hence the project status page to give that overview. It's at times like these we need dispassionate opinions of people far removed from the day-to-day of the project.﻿

The story so far in the open source drug discovery for malaria project. History. Last year the Todd lab at The University of Sydney received funding for a pilot project in open source drug discovery f...

Postdoctoral Position Available in Open Source Drug Discovery for Malaria. The University of Sydney, Australia. Salary approx $70K. Available immediately, initially for 12 months, with the possibility...

The evaluation of the arylpyrroles has gone well, in that we've identified promising new antimalarial compounds. Besides their high potency, they exhibit high levels of activity in a late-stage gameto...